


The Rope is Oh So Long

by Quitebrilliantindeed



Category: Xenosaga
Genre: Angst, Flashbacks, Mild Sexual Content, Multi, Pellegri/Herself, Yo!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2013-07-15
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:47:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quitebrilliantindeed/pseuds/Quitebrilliantindeed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pellegri has reached the end. Episode III Spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rope is Oh So Long

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [PIGACHM](https://archiveofourown.org/works/455213) by [Elendraug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug). 



> Oh goodness.
> 
> I think writing this made me become more attached to Pellegri.
> 
> It was really inspired by the fic that I linked to-- "PIGACHM," I quite fell in love with the Citrine/Pellegri ship, and found myself wanting to write something incorporating it. That idea grew into this... and ended up being an full-on exploration of Pellegri's character and relationships. Oh, and the "Enneagram" personality types that Xenosaga employs...?!  
> Hope you enjoy!

Once, when she was a little girl, Pellegri received a toy sword for her birthday.

Back then, she had thought the most important thing in the world was to be the best at everything—no exceptions. When she had first picked up a pen to draw, she worked day and night to hone her skills until she could hold her artwork up to her class and watch as they reveled in her talent. When the teacher first taught mathematics, she studied her sums while the other kids played outside, and got the first glittering ‘A’ stamped onto her test form. A little later, when makeup and fashion and haircuts came into her life, she ensured that she would always be at the envy of all those around her, styling herself as a stunning young woman with cutthroat intensity and a sharp eye that could knock a man flat.

There were no exceptions. That’s simply how it was—and that made her feel good.

Thus, when it came to the matter of the new toy sword, she knew that this would be no different than any of the other skills introduced to her young eyes—she would be the best at wielding the fake blade, and no one would stand in her way. That night, she had gone to her computer with the light of the screen dancing at her fingertips in the dark of her bedroom. It must have been quite late—9:30, or so. She had heard the faint bubble of adult-conversation rooms away from her own, but all was still in her own quarters, allowing her to study in peace. She was going to learn how to fight—and fight properly. The other kids might wave their sticks around and think themselves a warrior, but she was going to learn something of how you _actually_ were supposed to wield a blade.

So she read. She read, and she trained, alone in her backyard where no one could see her, until she was ready to show off her newfound skill.

All the kids at her school had one—it had been something of a fad at the time. When she came to school with her own blade tucked into her bag—then brandished on her hip at recess—it was really no surprise.

“You have to fight someone!” Her friend had said. She had been a short and stout girl, with freckles all across her nose. “It’s like… an initiation. You know? There’s a usually a bunch of kids back by the leaning-tree—you should take one of them on.”  The idea of such a challenge had delighted Pellegri.  It was perfect.

She sauntered over to the meeting spot with the kind of confidence only a nine-year-old could give, and drew her sword with a flourish. Murmurs passed among the small crowd, as well as a few good-natured giggles. For kids of their age, this was the highest form of excitement.

“I’m supposed to challenge someone, right?” She asked, a smile tugging at her lips. This was a proper community she had stumbled into, and the excitement of joining it as a prominent member was impossible for her to deny.

“Why don’t you fight me?” A boy had then said. She couldn’t remember most of his finer features now, except the ones that had stayed constant—black hair, narrow eyes, and a deceptively calm face.

“You’re on.”

Pellegri had been certain that she would be the best. After all, had she not spent so much time practicing and studying? Had she not dug back to the era of Lost Jerusalem, and scrounged its archives for information on the most ancient techniques and forms? It should have rendered her unbeatable.

But it didn’t. The boy had struck her down within a minute, leaving her stunned on the ground with a bruise on her side and dirt all over her white shorts and bare knees.

She had been speechless—quite literally. With some embarrassment, she remembered having laid there on the grass for longer than she should have, blinking off her shock and awe. It was the first time she hadn’t been the best at something—or at least as far as she was concerned.

Still, she had her dignity, and so did her opponent:

“Are you alright?” He had crouched over her, eyes wide with concern. “I hit you a bit harder than I should’ve…you’ll have to forgive me.” Pellegri thought that he might have helped her up after that, but all she could remember of that moment was being puzzled (and amused) at how old-fashioned and formal he sounded. Like an adult. Like a _grandpa._

“…Mmm.” She still couldn’t speak. She wasn’t angry—although she thought that she should have been—the only thing she wanted in that moment was to learn. Learn and improve from the best there was, until she could surpass him. “…What’s your name?” She had mumbled, still brushing her clothes off.

“Uzuki—Jin Uzuki.”

That was 27 years ago. Yes… 27 long years, and half-a-million catastrophes ago.

Pellegri supposed that this would be her last one. The cockpit was aflame with light, leaving her half-blinded and half-deaf from the blaring sirens that fired off around her head. It made her stomach twist.

“ _Warning: damage critical. Warning: damage critical. Warning…”_

“Computer: silence all warnings,” She breathed out heavily, slumping over in her chair. They slowed, but did not cease. “ _Now.”_ At her vicious command, they finally stopped.

It was a little bit ironic—that it was now ending the way it had begun, at the hands of Jin Uzuki. Grotesquely ironic, that is. The defeat might have stung more, but she had beaten him in the past, in their little spars and duels from oh so long ago. She had beaten him in the bedroom as well, if that even counted. But those were all different games, and in the one they now played, it only took one defeat to lose it all.

Through all the clamor, she thought she heard someone shouting at her—yes, someone was indeed shouting at her and—no surprise, it was Jin. He blabbered on and on about life and death, and how it wasn’t too late to do this or that, but… but it all seemed lost in the wind to her. Only half conscious of her words, she replied dully to his heroic statements, and let her thoughts roam elsewhere.

They came back to Jin. Of course.

After that day on the playground, Jin Uzuki had become her fast friend. She had wanted to know all there was to know about him—about whom he was, and how he could do what he did—and she wanted to learn to do it too. He was a complete enigma to her young mind, both in lifestyle and in talent, and it sucked her in like a vacuum. He fought with his toy-sword like all the other kids, but he was far better than any of them, and yet still, he was quiet and reserved, and surrounded himself with few friends, if any. Stranger still was the house that he lived in—it was far from the hub and bubble of the Miltian city, tucked away in a wood, and made to look like the homes of some era long passed.

As it turned out, his grandfather was a swordsman—and one with a thing for history. A pang of jealousy had reverberated through her heart when she learned of this, but her eagerness to absorb his knowledge drowned it out almost quicker than it had sprouted. This new friend of hers was a gateway to an entire world she had never known beforehand. Even if she hadn’t taken as much of a liking to Jin, she probably would have befriended him anyway, for the sake of all the culture and experiences that permeated his wondrous world of past-and-present.

That was not the case, however. She loved him more than anything or anyone she had ever encountered before. She went home with him after school, and some days, he even went home with her. Their families mingled as they played on the weekends, sparring with their swords when there was sun or curling up inside when it rained. He taught her calligraphy, and she taught him video games. He showed her ‘books’ made of paper and ink, and she painted pictures to accompany the stories that they held. He gave and she took, she gave and he took—it was a symbiotic relationship that stood steadfast for years and years, growing until they proudly added ‘best’ in front of the name ‘friend.’

“I’m so glad I met you,” She had finally told him one day at recess. They were sitting at the very same tree they had once fought at, now months ago.

“You too.” His voice was soft, but it was earnest, and that was enough to comfort her.

When they were ten, Jin’s grandfather extended an invitation to her—instead of learning secondhand from Jin the techniques of swordplay, perhaps she might like to come and learn it for herself. If Pellegri had been any more excited, she might have turned him down out pure anxiety. That night, with her hands cupped over her mouth, she ran from the shuttle that had taken her home, up the path in her front yard, and burst in through the doorway, shouting to her parents the good news. They had sighed and congratulated her in the exasperated, yet pleased, manner that all parents know and perform so very well. This too, was enough for her.

Pellegri started two days later. She remembered every lesson with a stunning clarity that could not be replicated in any other memory she owned. (Save for a few heated nights, with Jin—and—with others.) She came home with many a bruise beat into her sides, arms, and legs. Sometimes they fought and trained like the kids on the playground—without armor, but with far more discipline. Sometimes, they dressed in gear made specifically for the purpose of mock-battle, and practiced with even more codes and rigor.

They grew. Their limbs grew longer, their faces narrowed, and voices changed, yet the lessons did not. The intensity of them only increased with age, and the young children who had so gleefully played with toys were now training—training as if to fight in actual combat.

The first change came when she was fourteen—that was when Margulis came.

Looking back on it all, the arrival of that man was perhaps the real beginning of it all. Not quite the bookends that Pellegri had originally imagined, but it would be silly to deny the truth, and the truth of the matter was that he was the one who had set her life in motion. He came to train under Grandfather Uzuki (as she had come to know him), on the word that this man was a truer master of the blade than there ever was. He refused to reveal much more than that. Margulis was… curious. He had the skill to match (or surpass) Jin’s, and a drive even fiercer than her own. He was the image of commitment, and sharper than even the edge of his sword. He unnerved her, yet his curiosities drew her in—

“Where are you from?” She had asked.

The young man’s expression held a mild sense of contempt, but he replied: “Miltia, like you.” His eyes swept her up and down in silent judgment. “Judd, if you want the specifics.”

“Ah…” That was on the other side of the planet. “I actually have relatives there. Perhaps you know some of them…?”

“Your name doesn’t sound familiar.” And that was all she got out of him. He was that alternate scenario that she had once imagined with Jin—his personality was grating, but his life and his world (a mystery to her, one she wished to uncover) was worth the minor annoyance.

In the midst of it all, Jin’s mother had another child—they named her Shion—a pretty name. Jin told her that it was the word for a kind of flower, and it only made her like it more.

The second change came when she was eighteen—it was late, and she had not yet gone home to her apartment near the river, on the other side of town. She and Jin had curled up on a small sofa in the dark of the night, with only a flickering television screen and a thin streak of moonlight to illuminate the room. It was still spring—a warm day, and cozy cool sort of night that pushed the two of them together to share a little heat in the strange, paper-and-wood house.

She couldn’t remember how it started, or who had moved first, but that hardly mattered once it had begun. Maybe it was the shroud of darkness that covered them, or the closeness of their bodies, but their lips soon met, and their forms crossed and intertwined among the pile of blankets they had rested so quietly on. She shut the T.V. off, and slipped from her short dress and into his arms.

Of everything, Pellegri most fondly remembered the throbbing bruise he had left on the right side of her neck, just below the ear and under her short cut of hair. Even now, with the sparks and flames flying around her and that stupid man yelling at her to leave her craft, she found her hand resting on that spot, despite that loving memento being as long-gone as her love for him.

Old habits die hard.

The end came when she was twenty.

The road in her neighborhood ended at her house, with a small cobblestone walkway leading to the structure beyond. Pellegri made her way down the path, no different than when she was a child. Her parents—romantic as always—were out on a ceremonial ‘date night,’ and she was just returning from a evening out herself. Absently, she had wondered if they were home yet. She had been down the path to her house so many times at this hour, that her brain found no need to pay attention to it any longer. She would go into ‘autopilot,’ and would drift up the steps, bound through the door, and call out a bellowing “I’m home!” to anyone who might be inside.

“Ma’am? Would you be Miss Pellegri Rosenthal?”

It was that very routine that blinded her to the police car whirring at the edge of her lawn, and the stocky man who now confronted her.

“Uh…” She found herself stunned and spinning on her feet. “Yes… that’s me.” It felt as though she had been punched in the gut by his appearance, ripping the air from her lungs.

The man frowned—not an angry frown, but one of practiced—cautious—sympathy. “Ma’am, you may wish to sit down…”

Her parents. Out on their silly little date night. Dead. In a car crash—a dreadfully ordinary car crash.

“I’m sorry.” The comforting words of the policeman faded into a surreal buzz that swarmed around her head like a nest of hornets. She couldn’t remember what happened after that—official business, empty consolations, none of it mattered, and she pushed it all into a crooked, shambling pile as far from her sight as possible.

At some point or another, Jin had come to be holding her. She remembered mumbling in her ear and a hand running through her hair, but no reaction from herself—only an empty hole.

What she did remember was something worse. She had pulled back from his embrace almost forcefully, and gripped his shoulders.

“Fuck me.” She demanded, cruel and broken.

The bewildered reaction he gave only angered her more and made her nails dig into his skin: “Pellegri, I don’t think you’re—“  
“Fuck me,” She repeated, practically snarling under her breath. She couldn’t remember feeling anything in that moment. Not rage, not lust, not sadness—only a void and a wish to plug it up. “Please.” It came out as a hiccupping sob, against her will, “Please. Fuck me, please, oh please, just let me…” The sob had turned to tears, and she pulled herself up to his chest.

After that, he complied. It filled up the gaping hole in her heart with a hollow plug vaster than the emptiness she had wished to destroy. Their love was empty, their moans without passion, and their eyes without tears. Pellegri couldn’t remember any details beyond that—but she always wondered if it was any different for Jin.

They didn’t speak of it the next morning, but Jin stayed with her through all the legal proceedings that followed. He was kind, but she hardly had the strength to say more than a word to him.

A funeral was held not a week later, and then it all broke apart.

“Your parents,” Margulis had told her, one night after the ceremony, “Were descendants of the Immigrant Fleet. Did you know that?” Pellegri shook her head. She had only vaguely heard the name once or twice at family gatherings, but beyond that, the world of Ormus was limited to the politics playing out on her television screen. “I found out, at the funeral. We share that bloodline, Pellegri, of the People of Zohar…”

He  started to tell her stories—of Lost Jerusalem, of a holy people, and ancient artifacts… of birthright, and the greatest of human beings ever to walk the stars. In that moment, a thought possessed her:

Perhaps that was where her calling was—among the Immigrant Fleet, among U-TIC, among Ormus. Not playing samurai with Jin, in a place where she could never quite be the best at the trade she had picked.

“Tell me more.”

Sitting now, in the crumbling E.S. Issachar, Pellegri had her very first doubts that it might not have been the right decision to make.

It was indeed a betrayal to go along with Margulis, to leave her lover and teacher to wither and moan. These people she moved to align herself with were elitists, with selfish aims that destroyed planet after planet and life after life. Yet somehow, that had seemed to her to be the truest of callings. Did that mean that she too, was indeed one of those elitists? Were her mad desire to serve, and the way she threw away her feelings in senseless pursuit of those goals only proof of that? The sacrifices had seemed worth it at the time, when she had thought her purpose to be higher and the authorities over her grandiose and absolute.

Of course, that was all a lie. Grandiose? Yes. Absolute? Perhaps. Higher—divine? Absolutely not.

That damned Wilhelm.

Pellegri raised her hand from the sacred spot beneath her ear to wipe away the foolish tears that fell from her eyes. Perhaps karma was indeed real, and this was the payback she deserved. A betrayal for a betrayal.

When she left the Uzukis, she gave up using the blade. It was Jin’s weapon—not hers. The next day, she had dumped her swords into the basement of her parent’s dusty old house, and never laid eyes on them again. A lance suddenly seemed a far more fitting weapon for her.

Jin had been a monster that day. In all honesty, she had mostly deleted that fragment of her memory in sheer rage and horror—if she was selfish for leaving, selfish for abandoning him, and choosing the path of the Zohar’s People, then she could not imagine what that made him. If misogyny and sexism were truly things of the distant past in today’s world, Jin must have been the one surviving splinter of it on that day—she felt like his doll, his little prized possession that he couldn’t live without, and would throw a fit if it grew tired of his games and walked away.

She was not a doll. She was no one’s doll.

Maybe his behavior was a fluke, a slip-up made out of hurt and rage, and not some deeply-rooted prejudice… but it was suddenly _wonderful_ to be rid of him.

Layer by layer, she began to shed her excess wants and sentiments. A higher calling had found her, and it was time to let go of all that was holding her back—her parents, her past, her love, her desires. Surprisingly, it was a strange kind of bliss—to love no one but herself, her society, and her goals. It was pure commitment, weighed down by nothing she knew to be worldly or untrue.

Well, once again, that had all gone to the dogs.

Pellegri’s reverie was abruptly snapped by a sound that could only be described as a firework going off in her ear. Debris flew by in front of her craft—the large mechanical hand of the Issachar was now in pieces. With an absent and resigned sense of dread, it occurred to her that she likely did not have much more than a minute left.

Jin was still shouting at her.

She still ignored him. Her thoughts were drifting off once again—perhaps for the final time. Was this ‘your life flashing before your eyes?’ Pellegri had expected something better.

If there was any one person she expected to think about now, it was Jin, regardless of how her feelings towards him at twisted and morphed. Yet…

Yet it was that U.R.T.V. that came to mind. The girl on the _Merkabah._

If she still had the breath to do it, she would’ve laughed, a bitter laugh so hard that her sides would ache and her lungs would cough a violent storm in revenge.

Citrine. Of all the people. She had known her for fifteen minutes—no more and no less—and in a desperate swamp of uncertainty and fear that drove them to take comfort in one another, they had fucked on that damned warship. Fifteen minutes. Fifteen beautiful minutes of kisses and tongues, and the gentle thrum of slender fingers between her thighs. The thought made her shudder from the inside-out, even now.

Maybe, in another universe, things worked out differently. Maybe if she had met that woman earlier, maybe they could’ve escaped this nightmare and made a life somewhere. Maybe that little spark of love she had felt while she pressed her body close would have been enough to ignite a romance, had things been just a little different.

No. That was silly—her birthright, everything that made her who she was made that impossible. She could not choose or reject anything—in order to have this dream of hers, she would have had to have been an entirely different person. Pellegri could simply not exist.

The flames had engulfed the entirety of the E.S. by now, and with the first trace of sadness, she supposed that soon, she really wouldn’t exist.

Maybe reincarnation—maybe that was true. If nothing else was, she at least wanted _that_ concept to be real, so that maybe, just maybe, she could be reborn as something better. Someone more free than the damned Pellegri Rosenthal.

In that life, maybe Citrine would be free from her burdens as well.

Maybe they would be childhood sweethearts turned lovers. Maybe they would live in a house on a hill, near a river, like her old apartment had been. They could write, and paint, and travel without a single care in all the worlds.

Maybe she could teach her swordplay, and how to paint.

She always was the best at that.

From between the flames, a single black E.S. was still visible, its wide head glaring back at her sternly. With its gaze, the memories of Jin came flooding back into her head, drowning out her peaceful lost dreams. She would have been angry, or perhaps even happy, to see him now, but she was too tired, too lost, and too finished with it all, to even try.

It occurred to her then, if vaguely, that even as she considered other loves, Jin still haunted her. He probably always would, for all she knew, even if she was born anew. He would find her, and shove his path towards hers, violently and purposely trying to cross their fates that should never touch. If that was to be the case, if she was still to be denied Citrine and happiness, the only thing left to do now, was to snip out the bad parts, and try to focus on the good ones… the lessons with his grandfather, the innocent young friendship, and that long leaning tree rotting on the playground…

No. That wasn’t even worth it—she wanted none of this, only herself. She turned her head, and closed her eyes. Yes—no more.

The E.S. Issachar exploded in a volley of flame and smoke, and she got just what she wanted—no more.

**Author's Note:**

> Looking at this, I think it was partially inspired by Neil Gaiman's "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" in that it involves childhood flashbacks... I think a bit of the writing style sneaked in there too!?


End file.
